{{Style|Notes far too large. Notes shouldn't be double stacked. Information about building from source should be moved to the building section, not front-loaded into the intro. Links should be prettified. Redundant info (e.g. the precise date the new PKGBUILDs became available) should be striked. People can easily find this out for themselves if interested.}}

The [http://trinitydesktop.org/ Trinity Desktop Environment] (TDE) project is a fork of [[KDE]] 3.5 aiming to retain the traditional desktop style.

The [http://trinitydesktop.org/ Trinity Desktop Environment] (TDE) project is a fork of [[KDE]] 3.5 aiming to retain the traditional desktop style.

Most PKGBUILDs seem to build fine except arts is a bit bugged (at least on VMWare). They seem to build successfully on a system with the plasma package group installed, despite the warning below about building with KDE4 being present. Binary packages are available for x86_64 at the moment, see Unofficial user repositories#trinity.

Build from source

As of July, 2015, there are no Arch Linux Trinity packages, so you will need to create your own. See Creating packages.

To download the R14 source tarballs, follow the Download Source Tarballs link near the bottom of the Trinity R14.0.0 Release page.

The sources are in a git repo. More info on cloning it is at their GIT information page.

In TDE R14.0.3, the tdebindings package will not build with the current ruby 2.3 package installed on the system, or even with the ruby2.2AUR package, despite the R14.0.3 Release Notes claim to have "Added ruby 2.2 support". In particular tdebindings/qtruby/rubylib/qtruby/Qt.cpp seems to not be compatible with either package. Remove the ruby package while building tdebindings and re-install afterwards.

Then also, consider your preference for path ordering, whether /opt/trinity/bin should come before or after /usr/bin. This will give priority to one or the other of the KDE applications available through both Trinity and KDE/Plasma, if KDE/Plasma is also installed. The PATH environment variable may need to be modified in ~/.bash_profile and/or /etc/profile.d/trinity.sh.

Warning: If Trinity is installed alongside another Qt-based Desktop Environment, such as LXQt or KDE, then move, modify, or in some way disable /etc/profile.d/tqt3.sh and /etc/profile.d/trinity.sh. Otherwise the alternative Desktop will fail horribly when the "QT" and "XDG" environment variables are redefined in these files!

Both these files can be selectively enabled by wrapping their content with:

if ps -C starttde,starttrinity &>/dev/null ;then
...
fi

Start and configuration

After a successful install of TDE, the tdm desktop manager can be used to start TDE (and all other desktops) in the same manner kdm is used to start KDE Plasma. The init script for the display manager has been renamed from kdm to tdm to avoid conflicts. TDE includes a tdm.service file allowing systemd to start tdm at boot. TDE can also be started from the command line by including the path to starttde in your ~/.xinitrc. Either way launching tdm or TDE is straightforward.

Enable tdm.service in systemd to start tdm at boot

If systemd is configured to boot the default multi-user.target (default), all that is required is to configure tdm to start at boot is to enabletdm.service.

Configure to work with startx

Trinity provides a normal starttde. If you've followed the Arch packaging guidelines, it will be in /usr/bin. The easiest way to start Trinity is to simply add starttde at the end of ~/.xinitrc. If you do not presently have ~/.xinitrc, then simply copy it from /etc/skel or create it with the following entry:

Refusing to give up the Trinity "Kicker" panel

If you simply must have the Trinity "kicker" Desktop Panel and Applets while running Plasma5 or some other Desktop Environment, create this script and activate it. For Plasma5, use "System Settings -> Startup and Shutdown -> Autostart -> Add Script".